/lit/ - Literature

Wakefield Press and Twisted Spoon Press are the only ones I'd really buy on sight. I'm still critical with my NYRB Classics purchases.

Maybe Kornel Esti by Dezso Kosztolanyi, Primeval and Other Times by Olga Tokarczuk, and Tales of Galicia by Andrzej Stasiuk. I know there was another Kosztolanyi fan around at one point, but I don't know if he ever read Kornel Esti.

I would say The Hearing Trumpet, but it's been mentioned by a few other anons here. And I know for sure there's at least one other fan of Kenji Miyazawa here, so he wouldn't count.

Olga Tokarczuk and Andrzej Stasiuk. The former if you like small town settings and very slight magical realism, along with great characters and a more slice of life kind of plot. What I've read of Stasiuk could appeal in the same way, but he also has a even more prominent love of travel and people. I think he'd definitely be good for people watchers.

I'm personally really fond of Andrzej Stasiuk and Olga Tokarczuk right now. Read Tales of Galicia and Fado from the former, and Primeval and Other Times and currently reading House of Day, House of Night by the later.

Both are contemporary Polish authors who have a strange small town folkish vibe to their writing. It's not really magical realism, imo, but all four of the books I mentioned have a kind of comfortably surreal setting. They also have a way of portraying the towns themselves as characters, which I really love.

I'm hoping to check out Michal Ajvaz soon too, a contemporary Czech author. Amazon summary of The Golden Age by him, if anyone else might be interested:

"The Golden Age is a fantastical travelogue in which a modern-day Gulliver writes a book about a civilization he once encountered on a tiny island in the Atlantic. The islanders seem at first to do nothing but sit and observe the world, and indeed draw no distinction between reality and representation, so that a mirror image seems as substantial to them as a person (and vice versa); but the center of their culture is revealed to be “The Book,” a handwritten, collective novel filled with feuding royal families, murderous sorcerers, and narrow escapes. Anyone is free to write in “The Book,” adding their own stories, crossing out others, or even ap- pending “footnotes” in the form of little paper pouches full of extra text—but of course there are pouches within pouches, so that the story is impossible to read “in order,” and soon begins to overwhelm the narrator’s orderly treatise."

Some more books I highly recommend that I'm not sure anyone else here has read (though I'd love to be proven wrong on that):

Angel Riding a Beast by Liliana Ursu
My Tired Father by Gellu Naum
The Oval Lady: Six Surreal Stories by Leonora Carrington (and maybe The Hearing Trumpet? I never see anyone talk about it)
Teahouse by Lao She
River of Stars: Selected Poems of Yosano Akiko
Friends by Kobo Abe (a great example of his playwright abilities)
Tales of Galicia by Andrzej Stasiuk
Primeval and Other Times by Olga Tokarczuk (though I've been rec-ing the hell out of her and Stasiuk, so maybe someone's picked them up by now)

Hey /lit/,

I'm looking for books similar to Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar, Olga Tokarczuk's Primeval and Other Times, and Andrzej Stasiuk's Tales of Galicia.

Basically, what these three share are a very small town/village setting and an unsettling, interconnecting series of vignettes that culminates in something extremely disquieting. All three have some minor element of the supernatural in them as well.

I just really love that sense of build-up across different characters/events in a completely isolated and disturbing setting. I don't know what it is, but I want more of it. Any recommendations are appreciated!

Tales of Galicia by Andrzej Stasiuk.

Seems more like a collection of short stories connected by their setting of a small, melancholy town in Galicia at first, but they start to interlink more and more each chapter in very unexpected and usually deadening ways. Would probably very much appeal to anyone who lived in a small rural town, but also to anyone who enjoys that kind of claustrophobia and colorful characters. The language in it gets really creepy at times, mostly due to the deadpan detachment of some of the characters. About 140 pages.